The Nonimmigrant Visa application form filled out by the 9/11 hijackers asked, “Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?” They checked the box that said, ‘No’ and they were in.

The current incarnation of the form asks the same perfunctory and generic question. An actual terrorist is as likely to check the box as he is to finger a rosary while eating a ham sandwich and singing Hava Nagila. But since 9/11, the terrorist threat has evolved from foreign cells penetrating this country to domestic Islamist terrorists emerging out of Muslim settlements already occupying this country.

Most Islamic terrorists that the FBI has been dealing with had no specific terror plans at the time that they entered this country. Some Islamic terrorists, like the Tsarnaev perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing, came here as children. Others, like Omar Mateen, the Pulse shooter, and Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, contrived to be born in this country to foreign parents.

Immigration screening has to do more than just ask terrorists to check a box if they plan to fly planes into our skyscrapers. We must identify visitors and immigrants who are at a high risk of becoming terrorists in the first or second generation. The only way to do this is with a holistic strategy that examines the worldview of new immigrants and the Islamic communities they intend to be part of.

Instead of checking a perfunctory box, it is important to interrogate how a Muslim applicant views his religion and its interaction with the rest of the world. And to examine the mosque he plans to attend.

For example, attendees at the infamous Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia included Nidal Hasan, its former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki, and a number of key figures associated with the mosque were linked to Islamic terrorism. Any Muslim immigrants planning to attend the mosque could be considered at high risk for engaging in terrorism regardless of their stated views. Our current screening methods are laughably crude.

The immigrant visa form asks about engaging in and funding terrorism. It does not however specify what a terrorist group is. Muslims define terrorism differently and do not consider many of the Islamic terror groups listed on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list to be terrorists.

It asks about membership in the “Communist or other totalitarian party” and participation in various Columbian terrorist and militant organizations. Despite the thousands of people killed by Islamic terrorists in this country in the last few decades, it fails to ask anything about specific Islamist groups.

That should change.

Despite all the assurances about vetting, the forms don’t even bother to ask about membership in Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas or their parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is to Islamic terrorism what the Communist party was to subversive and terrorist groups during the Cold War.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a totalitarian organization. Its motto is, “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” This credo reflects the objective of a theocratic Islamic State to be achieved through any means: including violence. Its members have perpetrated and aided Islamic terrorism here and around the world. These include Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and the Brotherhood perpetrators of the genocide in Sudan.

Any Muslim immigrant who had ties to the Brotherhood has falsely answered the question and should be deported. If he falsely answered this question on his naturalization application, he should be subject to denaturalization and deported. Any Muslim who has subsequently become involved with Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR, ISNA, the MSA and countless others, should be investigated for pre-existing links with the terror network and prevented from becoming a citizen of this country.

Communities where Muslim immigrants propose to settle should be tested for their extremism levels as defined by the preponderance of Muslim Brotherhood institutions. Muslim immigrants who seek out communities under the influence of Brotherhood institutions should be considered at a higher risk of engaging in terrorism either in the first or second generation without regard for their current views.

Our goal is not just to stop terror plots now. Our goal must be to stop terrorism a decade from now.

Our counterterrorism is reactive instead of proactive. Reactive counterterrorism is measured by the time we have to react. When a terrorist opens fire in a shopping mall, reaction time is measured in minutes or seconds. His original descent into Islamic terror plots may go on for months or years. But the closer we get to the source of the problem, the more lead time we have until we are no longer reactive, but proactive. Instead of rushing to stop the next attack, we can transform the entire battlefield.

That must be our objective.

Our biggest problem is that we aren’t asking the right questions. Asking a Muslim if he is a terrorist is the wrong question. Islamic terrorists don’t see themselves as terrorists. They view themselves as devout Muslims. That is how we must see them if we are to find them out and stop them before they strike.

The root cause of Islamic terrorism is the idea that Muslims are superior and non-Muslims are inferior. Exposing this conviction won’t be done with a terrorism check box. Many Muslims who go on to commit acts of terror in the name of Islamic Supremacism have no such plans when they enter the country. They do however believe that there is a primal struggle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is this belief that they eventually put into practice at some later date by actually engaging in Islamist violence.

Instead of asking them whether they are terrorists, we ought to ask them how they view their participation in American life in light of the Koranic verse that commands Muslims, "O you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends. ”And whether they are willing to disavow the message of such terrorist verses of the Koran as, “Do not take friends from them unless they migrate in the Way of Allah. But if they turn away (from Islam), seize them and kill them wherever you find them.”

If they are not willing to disavow calls for the murder of non-Muslims, such as, "I will cast terror into the hearts of non-believers. Therefore strike off their heads”, they present a serious terrorism risk.

Can we really afford to allow Muslim immigrants into the United States who believe that they ought to "fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief: i.e. worshiping others besides Allah) and the religion will all be for Allah"? What better predictor of terror risk could there be than those who believe that they must “kill the non-believers wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them?” This is the origin of Islamic terrorism. It’s the acid test for every Muslim migrant.

It all comes down to three simple questions.

1. Have you ever had any associations with the Muslim Brotherhood or any of its front groups?

2. Will you commit to avoiding associations with Brotherhood mosques and other entities in this country? Are you aware that you may be deported if you do not?

3. Do you disavow the following verses of the Koran calling for violence against non-Muslims?

Such simple questions are far more relevant than a terrorism check box because they address what terrorists actually believe, not what we believe about them. They will not stop an active terrorist, but asking them will help keep out the terrorists of tomorrow.

They are not the final step. But they are a first step that can easily be taken next.

Lone wolf terrorism is the biggest trend in Islamic terrorism. Unlike classic Islamic terrorism, it requires no cells stretching across countries the way that 9/11 did. The perpetrators don’t even need to enter the country under false pretenses the way that the World Trade Center bombers did.

In many cases, they are already citizens. Some were even born in their target country.

Classic counterterrorism is directed at organizations. It’s inadequate for stopping individual Muslim terrorists like Omar Mateen who was able to murder 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando or closely related duos like the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston or the husband and wife team who carried out the San Bernardino terrorist attack which took the lives of 14 people.

Even the standard technique of planting informants into mosques, deeply opposed by the Islamic lobby in the United States, fails when individuals decide to act alone or only trust their wives or brothers to be in on the plot with them. If an individual Islamic terrorist fails to let his plans slip, either online or to an FBI informant, stopping him can be extremely difficult if not entirely impossible without a stroke of luck.

And Islamic terrorists only need to be lucky once. We have to be lucky every time.

Every absurd Islamic terror plot broken up by law enforcement, the type of thing dismissed by the media and ridiculed by commentators, launching rockets at planes, underwear bombs and blowing up trains, contained the seed of a horrific terrorist attack just like Orlando, Boston or Nice.

When you turn on the evening news and see a running death toll, it’s because one of those absurd and ridiculous terror plots actually succeeded. And it’s happening more and more often.

The reason is simple. Unlike classic Islamic terrorism which required organization and infrastructure, the new brand of Islamic terror only needs one thing… Muslims.

Lone wolf terrorism operates entirely off the existing Muslim population in a particular country. The bigger the Muslim population, the bigger the risk. Any Muslim or Muslims who have settled in a particular non-Muslim country can answer the call of Jihad at any given time without warning.

There is no way that the FBI or other law enforcement agencies could begin to monitor even a fraction of the Islamic settler population sympathetic to terror. The FBI alone has almost 1,000 active ISIS cases it was investigating last year in all 50 states. It does not have nearly the resources it needs to handle them.

As the Muslim settler population in the country increases, the number of cases will grow. No matter how much law enforcement expands the scope of its operations, it will not be able to keep up with the high natural birth rates of the Muslim settler population whose terrorists don’t need a fraction of the training or skills that trained law enforcement figures do. The more the Muslim population grows, the more terror attacks like Orlando, Boston and Nice will get past law enforcement.

Any technological or logistical solutions to this crisis on the law enforcement end will only be band aids.

The source of the problem is Islamic immigration. That is the only possible solution. The only way to reduce the growth of the lone wolf Islamic terrorism problem is to reduce or end Muslim migration.

If this is how bad it is when Muslims are only 1% of the population, what happens when the Muslim settler population doubles and then doubles again? Accompanying these rising population numbers will be rising influence by the Islamic lobby. Islamic groups such as CAIR with a history of terror ties and opposition to counterterrorism will have even more power to stymie law enforcement investigations. The end result will be far more successful Muslim terrorist massacres taking place on a constant basis.

Muslim immigrants are already inherently privileged when it comes to their ability to enter this country ahead of far more peaceful and far more deserving groups. For example, the vast majority of Syrian refugees admitted to this country are the Muslims who perpetrated and are perpetuating their religious war in the region rather than their Christian and Yazidi victims who face slavery and genocide at their hands.

This Islamic immigration privilege must be withdrawn. Muslim immigration must at the very least be scaled back to a level that law enforcement can cope with. At best it must end entirely until the Muslim world manages to stabilize its way of life to the extent that it can peacefully co-exist with non-Muslims.

There will be endless arguments over what percentage of Muslims support terrorism, but our own experience of recent attacks shows that many of them came from attackers who overtly appeared to be “moderate” and “ordinary”. For every Islamist activist dressed in Salafist fashion and tweeting praise of ISIS, there is at least one, if not many more, whom you would pass on the street without a second look.

Before the Boston Marathon bombing, the Tsarnaevs did not seem like Jihadists. They would have been classed with the general category of “moderate” Muslims. And then they struck.

That is how it is.

The internet has decentralized terrorist training camps. Any Muslim can acquire the skills and equipment he needs to kill a few or a dozen or even a hundred if he chooses to follow his religion.

Not every Muslim will shoot up a nightclub or bomb a marathon, but we have no foolproof way of telling them apart. And even many Muslims who would not shoot up an office party in San Bernardino will still sympathize with the perpetrators. And even those Muslims who don’t will often continue supporting the Muslim lobby of organizations like CAIR that stymie law enforcement investigations of Islamic terrorism.

Muslim immigration makes Muslim terrorism worse.

Once we understand this inconvenient truth, then everything else naturally flows from it. The type of terrorism that we are dealing now won’t be beaten by breaking up organizations or droning terrorist leaders in training camps in Yemen or Pakistan. The enemy is right here. He speaks our language. He walks down our streets. He looks at us with hate in his Halal heart and he plots to kill us.

He may pledge allegiance to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but he is part of the larger organization of Islam. It is this organization, more than any of its Jihadist factional subdivisions, that represents the true threat.

Lone wolf terrorism is a viral threat that is spread by Islamic migration. We can only end it by closing the door. As long as the door to the Muslim migrant stays open, we will live under the threat that our neighbor or co-worker will be the one to kill us tomorrow or the day after that.

Last week the media lost its mind over reports that press briefings might be moved from the White House back to the Eisenhower Office Building next door where President Eisenhower held the first ever televised press conference.

Media outlets issued panicked reports of being “evicted”, “kicked out” or “exiled” from the cramped theater that used to be the White House’s indoor swimming pool. There was outrage at the thought that they might have to take an equally short walk to the White House Conference Center where they had already worked while the Bush White House spent millions in taxpayer money renovating the room.

"The press went crazy, so I said, 'Let's not move it.'" President Trump finally reassured them.

He got as much gratitude for it as President Nixon did for ruining a perfectly good indoor pool and as President Bush did for spending a fortune renovating it. Instead the media began spreading the same conspiracy theories accusing Bush of plotting to permanently banish them from the White House.

And that’s exactly what President Trump should do.

“There’s no way the people are being served if they kick the people’s representatives out of the People’s House,” Ron Fournier absurdly postured. The people elected President Donald J. Trump. Nobody elected Ron Fournier. The National Journal he works for, like most of the Atlantic media properties, specializes in inside baseball for insiders.

Trust ratings and approval levels for the media are so far down in the toilet that it would take a plumber to find them. If the media are the people’s representatives, then the people want to elect different ones. Those are some of the same representatives that the media is trying to ban from social media with a fake “Fake News Crusade” and by resisting any expansion of press briefings with threats and warnings.

“We’ll have to consider doing things other than protesting and whining,” Fournier threatened. “We’ll have to think about what we can do to bring some pain to make our point.”

Do what?

Run items accusing President Trump of being a traitor, a liar, a racist, a rapist and a Batman villain? The media has already done all of those. What else is it going to except shout more lies even louder?

Within a brief span of time, the media’s fake news operation claimed that Trump had banished the bust of MLK, lifted quotes from a Batman villain and had been cavorting with Russian prostitutes.

And that he was a compulsive liar.

That last accusation is notably hilarious considering the honesty and integrity of the media.

We have had to endure days of the media screaming about crowd sizes at the inauguration and the anti-Trump march they were promoting, of claiming that a sentiment as generic as returning power to the people was lifted from a Batman villain, and of dismissing the worst abuses of their colleagues, whether it was lying about the MLK bust, lying about Rick Perry’s job or peddling the lies of the Steele dossier as intelligence work, as mistakes while shouting that Sean Spicer was a liar. Enough is enough.

Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist and former public editor of the New York Times, declared, “President Trump intends to make the American media his foremost enemy.”

If she had a shred of honesty, she would admit that the media had made him its foremost enemy.

The media will tell any lie about Trump. It starts every day by accusing him of a dozen different things. And it ends every day by accusing him of a dozen others. It has no standards and no ethics. When one lie, such as the claim that Trump had banished the bust of Martin Luther King, falls apart, they roll out another one. Then they inflate the lie they just told by reporting on it as if it were an actual event. It’s time to get the press out and restore the White House indoor swimming pool to its original function. The press can remain in it if they don’t mind wet clothes, moldy laptops and ruined cameras.

Press conferences used to be called in the Oval Office and reporters would hang out close to the action. Then, largely Republican presidents, helped make the media’s occupation permanent. And its sense of entitlement grew. It now believes that it has more of a right to be there than President Trump.

President Trump should disabuse them of that delusion.

When we talk about the media, we really mean the representatives of a handful of corporations who are in the business of advocating for the left and attacking the right. There is no journalism involved in all this: only opposition research. The distinction between the media and the political left no longer exists.

There is no reason to embed a voice of the political opposition in the White House whose only function is using the press briefings as platforms for their smears. Nor is there any reason to provide special status to a handful of corporate left-wing operatives while leaving out the rest of the spectrum.

Trump has been opening up more opportunities for conservative media. And that’s a good thing.

The media’s tantrums over being moved from the little theater, no matter how moldy and crumbling it might be, isn’t sentiment; it’s status. Keeping the space small allows them to limit who gets in.

It’s time to open it up.

After the tantrum the media threw over Spicer’s briefing, there is no reason to keep their private club around. Move it out of the White House and open it up to various journalists across the spectrum.

The media hates the idea of Trump tweeting. They ought to get used to it. Their old form of access journalism with its layers of privilege, anonymous sources and selective leaks is the old way. And it makes no sense to provide access journalism to a media whose only agenda is soliciting malicious leaks.

Digital access isn’t the future. It’s the present.

The White House press corps is an outmoded institution. There’s no need to crowd a small number of media elites into a limited space. Or any space at all. We live in a world of instantaneous communications. Every smartphone is capable of doing more than the laptops that reporters were laboring over in the Clinton years. Any of the men and women in that room can email or text their questions. The briefings serve no useful function except as political theater by a privileged class.

President Trump has vowed to drain the swamp. A good place to start is the smarmy swamp of privilege over the White House indoor pool. The small club of the press corps is the embodiment of the old establishment and its corrupt gatekeepers that he has vowed to get rid of. Instead of sparring with them in briefings, it’s time to eliminate their special status and strip them of their privileges.

Trump doesn’t have to go to war with the press corps. All he has to do is make it irrelevant.

In the first days of 2017, Washington D.C. was empty. It was a city holding its breath. Secret Service police officers in balaclavas waited at the White House as a black SUV carrying departing staffers passed. It had not been so long ago that they came into the city as if they owned it and the entire country. Now the same men and women who ran and ruined the lives of millions were scrolling through job postings on their smartphones. They watched Obama speak from faded screens at sports bars and they cried.

They knew it was coming. Day 1.

The parties and the protests are underway. Hundreds of thousands of Americans and anti-Americans have converged on the city: Tea Party housewives from Milwaukee suburbs and snarling Marxists from the ANSWER coalition, small businessmen from Houston and Berkeley J20ers outshouting the schizophrenic homeless panhandlers at Union Station.

While Trump and Pence are at St. John's Episcopal Church, Black Lives Matter will be howling abuse at D.C.’s black police officers at Metropolitan Police Headquarters. As Trump takes his oath of office, the Future is Feminist Counterinaugural Action will try to disrupt the event with their “bodies.” As Trump speaks to unify America, leftist protesters plan to smoke pot on the National Mall.

They can’t stop what’s coming. And they know it. The crying Obama staffers loading boxes into their cars and the Marxists biting their lips as they color in their signs on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial feel it. The pundits of the Post, the non-profit parasites and the entire cocktail party circuit can sense it.

Day 1 is more than just a day. It’s the end of an era. It’s the end of Obama.

Berlin, November, 1989. Moscow, August, 1991. Washington D.C., January, 2017. That’s the closest you can come to describing it. It’s the fall of an evil empire. There are breaths of fresh air as the cleansing rain washes away eight years of oppression, lies and corruption into the sewers of the city.

Day 1.

Trump has executive orders ready to go. While the ceremonies run their course, real change is already underway. The parade that matters is the slow march of Obama’s minions leaving and Trump’s people coming in. The transition began as a trickle, a few here and there, but is swiftly becoming a takeover.

The “landing team members” have moved in. And Obama’s people are moving out to be replaced by “beachhead teams”. What started with dozens and then hundreds will become thousands. These clashing armies wear uniforms of black suits and skirts. They wield smartphones and task lists. And they run the country.

That’s what the “peaceful transition of power” touted by Obama really means. A force of men and women the size of a small army will depart and another will arrive and take their place. They will do it without a shot being fired. The transition will not be entirely peaceful. The mobs of protesters will see to that. And the boycott of the inauguration by House Democrats is a rejection of that transition of power.

The roadblocks, barricades and fences are there to block the radical left’s plots to physically shut down the inauguration. Meanwhile their political allies in Congress are building roadblocks and barricades to jam up Trump’s nominees in endless committee sessions and hearings.

They can’t stop Day 1. But they are doing everything that they possibly can to slow it down.

Their battle plan is to confirm as few of Trump’s people as possible. The longer it takes to get new leaders into place, the longer it will take those leaders to bring in new people to make reforms. The endless hearings aren’t just political theater. They are an organized effort by the left to retain control of the government for as long as possible while tangling Trump’s agenda in red tape right from the start.

The protesters and the politicians have the same agenda. They want to stop reform from Day 1.

Walk past the White House, a modest building, serene and gracious with all the attention of the world on it, over to the monstrosity that Mark Twain once dubbed “the ugliest building in America.”

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, that pile of Second Empire mansard roofs and porticoes, which looks as if Napoleon III had set up shop in the heart of our national government, is where the patriots struggling to overthrow another progressive unconstitutional emperor will mobilize.

Forget the balls. The truly fancy footwork will happen as Trump’s beachhead teams try to take over parts of the government. And the real protests won’t be the freak shows with giant signs, mock heads, pink costumes and joints. It will be a grim battle fought in the undercity of the bureaucracy.

And it will be an unrelenting battle that will go on for years.

While Trump takes his oath of office, moving trucks will be transporting the Obama occupation out of the White House. The first of the moving vans has already come and gone. And when all the moving trucks have transported away the last of the occupation, a new wind will blow through the White House.

Despite the roadblocks and the sabotage, Day 1 is coming.

Team Trump is ahead of schedule and under budget. A fifth of the funds are even being returned. When all the t-shirts are sold and the flyers are carried away in trash bags, there will be a new government.

And for the first time in eight years, it will be an American government.

That is what Day 1 really means. Not an era, but an error has ended. Day 1 means the restoration of freedom and the end of tyranny. It means security at home and respect abroad. It means change.

There were those who celebrated and those who mourned the fall of the USSR. So too there are those who celebrate and those who mourn the end of Obama. The tears of leftist hipsters crying over Obama are no different than those of the old women holding up Stalin’s portrait on May Day in the Red Square.

As the day ends with the Liberty and Freedom Ball, millions will celebrate because these words have meaning once again. They will celebrate because they have been liberated and now they are free.

Day 1 means many things to many people. Most of all it means that millions have reason to hope.

After midnight, in the last days of the last year, I stood at the Lincoln Memorial. Though millions visit it, the vast space was empty. The first Republican president watched over Washington D.C. in silence.

Or almost empty.

A large rat scurried down the steps and vanished into the shadows. Mr. Lincoln watched it go. As he now watches Obama depart.

(This article was originally published here at Front Page Magazine.)

The Fake News crusade began with BuzzFeed, more than any other member of the media, and it deservedly ends there. It began with BuzzFeed faking news to kick off a crusade against Fake News.

The fake news that BuzzFeed faked was about the threat of Fake News. The numbers were wrong. But that didn’t stop BuzzFeed from warning that what it called Fake News was beating real news. And that’s probably true. BuzzFeed’s discredited Trump dossier story outperformed the NBC story discrediting it.

The Fake News meme was already fading even before BuzzFeed dragged CNN down with it. The Washington Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, had claimed that the term was “tainted” and needed to be retired; much like her paper. Sullivan warned that non-liberals were using it to attack the media. There was a complaint from the New York Times that conservatives had “appropriated” the term. Meanwhile Sullivan had cited claims about Fake News from BuzzFeed arguing that “something has to happen”. On the panel with Sullivan was the CEO of The Onion: a real fake news organization.

After BuzzFeed’s big fail, the exodus from the USS Fake News is happening faster than rats diving into the icy waters around the Titanic. Seth Meyers, one of those fake news talk show hosts, like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert or John Oliver, whom lefties prefer to get their real news from, dubbed it “busted”.

“Today, Trump called these new reports ‘fake news,’ so despite an incredibly short run, I think it is time to retire that term,” Meyers whined. Trump and conservatives had rudely moved into a gated media community and, as with the arrival of the first black family on the block, it was time to move on.

There are complaints that conservatives are using “Fake News” incorrectly as if it’s some sort of technical term that requires years of study to properly deploy at a graduate seminar. Sullivan claimed that, “Fake news is a very narrow thing.”

How narrow? So narrow that it can’t possibly be applied to the media. Only people the media hates.

The Post’s Callum Borchers claimed that Brian Williams’ lies and Dan Rather’s Microsoft Word letter from the seventies weren’t really Fake News. In an attack on Fake News, Post columnist Petula Dvorak injected her own fake news by blaming Sarah Palin for the Giffords shooting. But that’s not Fake News because the media says so. Now stop calling it that or the media will take its smear and go home.

The retirement of Fake News will be a mostly painless process because the media got what it wanted. Social media sites have put the media in charge of censoring its users. Twitter, which already had the same politically correct lunatics screaming hysterically about oppression on college campuses in charge of deciding who gets to tweet, was an easy win. Facebook kicked and struggled, but then gave in.

The experts in charge of deciding what links you can and can’t share on Facebook include the good people at Snopes, who are accusing each other of embezzlement, and the Poynter Institute, whose fact checker, Craig Silverman, was hired by BuzzFeed as its media editor where he aggressively pushed claims about Fake News on BuzzFeed while cheerleading fact checkers censoring Facebook.

The media leveraged the “Fake News” witch hunt to get its internet censorship. Now that it has it, the term is a pesky inconvenience that anyone, even Trump, can culturally appropriate.

And so the media will strive to kill it with as much enthusiasm as it once propagated it.

BuzzFeed, which also served its purpose, is being written off. The vapid listicle site was thrown under the bus by CNN and scolded by the Poynter Institute. NBC’s Chuck Todd accused BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith of publishing “fake news” by running the fake Trump dossier. The fake outrage is old.

After President-elect Trump called BuzzFeed a "failing pile of garbage", it began selling bumper stickers that said, “I proudly get my news from a failing pile of garbage.” CNN, among other media organizations, can proudly buy them and stick them on the backs of their news vans and Tesla convertibles.

CNN boss Jeff Zucker had dismissed the idea that BuzzFeed was a legitimate news organization right before he hired away Andrew Kaczynski. Kaczynski had been responsible for delivering many of BuzzFeed’s anti-Trump hit pieces. His last story for BuzzFeed was headlined, “Donald Trump Appeared In A 2000 Playboy Softcore Porn”. The headline read like it was written by one of those foreign sites that BuzzFeed blamed for Trump’s victory. But this was what CNN wanted.

The media isn’t in the news business any more than your Aunt Sally is.

BuzzFeed is the future of the media and the media is just a less successful BuzzFeed. In the age of the internet, news is an expensive and unrewarding enterprise. What the media actually does is repackage viral content under its own brand. This content can consists of anything from pets doing cute things to angry social justice crybullies denouncing transphobia. The media’s mission is to pass along this content while limiting its exposure. That’s what happened with the fake Trump dossier.

BuzzFeed took a bunch of garbage that was floating around and published it. Its claim that it practiced “ferocious reporting” is a joke. CNN did the same thing but was more careful about it.

The Fake News crusade was about locking down the viral business model by keeping conservative competitors locked out. Keeping it going any longer is dangerous. And not just because of Trump. Media Matters wants to keep the term alive and deploy it against the rest of the media. Its guide to the “Fake News Universe”, a dimension inhabited by David Brock and the remains of Hillary’s fanbase, includes not only the usual galaxy of conspiracy, clickbait, satire and hyperpartisan sites that were on the media’s hit list. The Universe also features “Mistakes In Reporting” by a “legitimate news outlet”.

This is exactly the kind of Fake News civil war that the media was carefully trying to avoid.

Brock once charged that the New York Times had earned a “special place in hell” by becoming a "megaphone for conservative propaganda”. In other words, it had become a distributor of Fake News.

Like most left-wing revolutions, the Fake News crusade can easily end up devouring its own parents.

And so Fake News has gone from an urgent crisis to the backburner. Last month, Hillary Clinton had warned that “lives are at risk” in the battle against Fake News. Now the term has become “useless”.

But the ideas behind it aren’t going anywhere. Fake News was a shorthand term for delegitimizing and censoring non-media sources. The censorship is on its way to becoming a reality. And another term will take its place. The media does not care what is real or fake. It exercises power to impose its narrative.

But the Fake News meme left the media’s self-interest more exposed than its usual narratives. It highlighted its weakness for telling any lie that suited its political agenda.

Fake News made it too easy to shout that the media empire isn’t wearing any factual pants. It has as little to do with the business of facts as your local bakery. It isn’t in the business of news, real or fake, but of narratives. It tells stories. Many of these stories are false. But the falseness or truth of a media item is only secondary to its two big purposes: convincing you to believe something and making money.

The differences between CNN, BuzzFeed and a straight fake news site are stylistic. Just as the differences between Brian Williams and Stephen Colbert were artistic and business strategies.

The news media is just another arm of a politicized entertainment industry.

That’s why Candice Bergen, who played a fictional news anchor on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, was offered a spot at CBS’s news division on 60 Minutes. It’s why so many progressives got their news from the Daily Show or why Brian Williams appeared so often on 30 Rock.

And it’s why BuzzFeed is a member of the media.

The ink was hardly dry on the Secretarial Order from Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell blaming California’s drought on global warming that rain and snow swept across the state. San Francisco International Airport was forced to cancel flights and there were blizzard warnings for Lake Tahoe.

The Los Angeles Times warned breathlessly of a winter war footing. San Francisco, the home of a million companies cashing in on environmental panics, received 130% of average rainfall. Sacramento, where terrible ideas from San Francisco go to become law under a Democratic supermajority, is at 160%.

Governor Jerry Brown had signed an executive order last year making temporary drought restrictions all but permanent. “Drought is becoming a regular occurrence,” Executive Order B-37-16 stated. Then the proposal to "Make Conservation a California Way of Life" had made a big splash among bureaucrats.

"California is currently in the grips of an extreme drought with record low precipitation," it gloomily began. Then the Sacramento River flooded, the downtown rainfall record was broken and copies of the report came in handy as makeshift umbrellas by scurrying staffers. So there was nothing left to do but blame Global Warming.

If the rain doesn’t fall, that’s Global Warming. If it does fall, that too is Global Warming. The moonbeam left has traded in God for Global Warming as its universal answer to everything.

After years of predicting that California’s future would be a barren desert, the predictions have been slightly revised. California is now doomed to alternate between droughts and storms. And if it rains cats and dogs over Death Valley, we will be told that Global Warming causes canine and feline precipitation and that unless we agree to give Al Gore more money, we’re doomed to be brained by falling felines. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown believes in Global Warming the way that the followers of his old pal, Jim Jones, believed in drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. He’s even prepared to put his satellites where his brain is.

"We've got the scientists, we've got the lawyers and we're ready to fight," Brown ranted to the American Geophysical Union. "If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite."

Anyone who doubts that Governor Moonbeam can launch his own satellite ought to take a close look at how well high-speed rail is coming along. After being backed by Obama’s stimulus plan in ’09, the first and easiest leg of it has lately been delayed by four years. The stimulus money has to be spent by next year and there’s no way to pay for any of the rest of it except with more global warming taxes.

At this rate, the magic anti-Trump satellite would cost $100 billion and be ready to go by 2054.

But that’s pocket change considering how much money California has already spent and lost on Governor Moonbeam’s obsession with the Great Green Apocalypse.

Brown demanded that Obama institute a permanent ban on offshore drilling. Offshore drilling might even produce enough money to fund his high-speed rail obsession. But math and Moonbeam have never been on speaking terms. He doesn’t have policies. He has dreams.

"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams. We can pursue a path of benign energy," he once said.

The drought has allowed Brown to pursue his dreams. Global Warming is a crisis in search of a disaster. Warmunists struggle to tether it to any natural or unnatural disaster from random hurricanes to the civil war in Syria.

An op-ed at the Los Angeles Times asked readers to see, “the devastation of climate change in the ruins of Aleppo.” It makes the fashionable claim that the war wasn’t caused by Sunni-Shiite hostilities but by, what else, drought. Syria has apparently been suffering from the “worst drought in nine centuries.”

Who knew that detailed rainfall records had been kept in Syria for nearly a thousand years?

The civil war in Syria might be explained by the 900 year drought, but what about the wars in Yemen, Libya, the Sinai, Mali and countless other places as part of the Arab Spring? Was there a drought in the eighties during the last Sunni-Shiite civil war in Syria between Assad Sr. and the Muslim Brotherhood?

Or during any of the countless wars that have been taking place in the area for thousands of years?

California’s current drought is said to be the worst in 1,200 years. Others insist it’s merely the worst in 500 years.

Who knew that hunter-gatherers without a written language could keep such careful records?

But it’s all about how you define “drought”. The Great Drought of the 1860s was a good deal worse in lack of rain and in the devastating impact on California. There were drier years far more recently than 1,200 years ago. And there wasn’t a whole lot of industry in California in the 1860s to blame it on.

To call this the worst drought in 150 years, never mind 1,200 or 12 billion years, you have to customize the definition of “drought” to make it so. Like so much of Warmunism, you draw the target around the arrow. And once you have your crisis, then you can use alarmism to make a massive power grab.

"I think this almost has to be at the level of a crusade," Governor Brown declared.

Now Brown’s crusade is all wet. But Warmunist alarmism recovers quickly every time the world
doesn’t end at the stroke of midnight. In the seventies, environmentalists were promoting Paul Ehrlich’s claims that 65 million Americans would starve to death a decade later. At the British Institute for Biology, he predicted that, “England will not exist in the year 2000”. Today Ehrlich, the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, is predicting that we’ll soon have to turn to cannibalism.

If you doubt any of this, you must hate science.

Later the panic switched to predicting an ice age. The various doomsday scenarios under the umbrella of “climate change” have kept rotating in and out like bad actors on a cheap stage.

A 2003 DOD report envisioned flooding could producing an inland sea in California. Recently the National Research Council report, sponsored in part by California, warned that San Francisco International Airport could be flooded in a few decades. The worst drought in 12 billion years made for some better headlines because the drought, unlike most of the other scenarios, actually existed. But before long the Green Apocalypse crowd will be predicting a California buried under mountains of ice.

Natural disasters are the drama that lubricates a corrupt government industry which deprives ordinary people of water, food, heating and life out of a combination of ideological hostility to technology and the flow of money to special interests in the business of saving the planet from a manufactured crisis.

The California state budget approaches $180 billion. That’s a 5% increase in only one year. But being an “international leader” in fighting “climate change” doesn’t come cheap. The new budget grabs even more cap-and-trade power to be spent on Big Green Business and reinforces the illegal tax for auctioning off “pollution” allowances. And then there’s e money for the high-speed rail to nowhere.

None of this will stop droughts or storms. But it will move money to the right people. The ones, like Al Gore, living in luxury condos in San Francisco about to be flooded by the Great Green Apocalypse that never comes. And it’s always been about the money. Everything else is theater. Rain or sun, flood or drought, the scripts get rewritten, the bills get passed and the Global Warming show goes on.

(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)

“Is the two-state solution dead?”

The two-state solution, a perverse euphemism for carving an Islamic terror state out of the land of Israel and the living flesh of her people, is in trouble. The solution, which has solved nothing except the shortage of graves in Israel and Muslim terrorists in the Middle East, is the object of grave concern by the professionally concerned from Foggy Bottom to Fifth Avenue.

Obama set up his betrayal of Israel at the UN to “save” the two-state solution from Trump. The media warns that David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador, is so pro-Israel that he’ll kill the “solution.”

But you can’t kill something that was never alive.

The two-state solution is a zombie. It can’t be dead because it never lived. It was a rotting shambling corpse of a diplomatic process. If you stood downwind of the proceedings, it looked alive.

Up close there was only blood and death.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the two-state solution didn’t solve anything and it wasn’t in the business of creating two states. Not unless you count a Hamas state in Gaza and a Fatah state in the West Bank.

What problem was the two-state solution solving?

It wasn’t the problem of terrorism. Turning over land, weapons and power to a bunch of terrorists made for more terrorism. It’s no coincidence that Islamic terrorism worldwide shot up around the same time.

The consequences of giving terrorists their own country to play with were as predictable as taking a power drill to the bottom of a boat or running a toaster in a bubble bath. The least likely outcome of handing guns to homicidal sociopaths was peace. The most likely was murder. And that was as intended.

The problem that the two-state solution was solving was the existence of Israel; the Jewish Problem.

Spray the two-state solution over an irritating country full of Jews who managed to survive multiple Muslim genocides. Apply and wait for as long as it takes until the Jewish Problem is solved again.

The two-state solution didn’t end the violence. It turned it up to eleven. It didn’t even create a Palestinian state. But it did a moderately decent job of solving the Jewish Problem by killing Jews.

It killed thousands of them. It filled cemeteries, ethnically cleansed towns and villages, and brought war to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for the first time in a generation. It turned terror from an aberration into a routine. It made death into a way of life for the Muslim population controlled by the terrorists and the Jewish population targeted by them. It endangered the existence of Israel for the first time since 1973.

The two-state solution isn’t dead. It is death.

The “solution” has turned children into orphans and left parents weeping at the graves of their daughters. It has sown hilltops with dragon’s teeth of rockets and sent cities fleeing to bomb shelters. It has ushered in an endless age of wars against terrorists who can’t be utterly defeated because that would destroy the two-state solution.

And it can’t get any better. Only worse.

Death is the only thing that the two-state solution has ever accomplished. That’s the only thing that it was meant to accomplish. It’s all that it will ever accomplish.

The two-state solution is a zombie. Its existence has no purpose except death. As long as it goes on moving, it will go on destroying. But, like a zombie, the two-state solution is weak. It’s a slow and shambling thing. It’s absurdly easy to escape it. The only way it can catch you is if you let it.

In the nineties, the two-state solution looked like a living thing. There were negotiations and big plans. There were ceremonies and Nobel prizes being handed out like party favors. There were equally big bombings and mangled body parts smeared along sidewalks and storefronts. But it was easier to listen to another round of peace songs and pay no attention to the ghastly carnage.

But by the oughts, the Muslim settler population in ’67 Israel, for whose benefit the two-state solution had been crafted, made the same “democratic” decision that the Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries would later make. They chose the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic law that demands that non-Muslims must surrender and be ruled by Muslims as before. Or be massacred and subjugated.

And then the zombie solution began to rot from the head.

The two-state solution was kept alive by pretending that Hamas had never won. An illegal takeover by Fatah, the “good” Islamic terrorists who were willing to pretend to negotiate in exchange for enough foreign aid from the United States, led to two Islamic terror states, one in Gaza and one in the West Bank. These states occasionally tried to form a united government, but couldn’t even get along with each other. Never mind getting along with Israel.

The two-state solution had become a ghoulish joke.

Some two-state solutionists urged embracing Hamas. A crazed collection of leftist activist “Rabbis” even signed a petition calling for outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood terror state despite a charter which called for exterminating all the Jews. Kerry aided a Code Pink mission to Hamas.

Most two-state solutionists decided to pretend that nothing had gone wrong. The zombie solution was in the best of health. Pay no attention to the stench of decay and the way it keeps trying to eat you.

They wanted to strengthen the “good” Islamic terror state in the West Bank to discredit the “bad” Islamic terror state in Gaza. Anyone who opposed the “good” terror state was accused of trying to kill the “two-state solution” which had already killed more people than the average natural disaster.

But then the “good” terror state stopped even pretending to negotiate.

Since the terrorists wouldn’t negotiate, Obama and Kerry just propped up the corpse of the two-state solution on their shoulders, Weekend at Bernie’s style, and tried to pretend it was still alive by negotiating with Israel on behalf of the terrorists without telling either Israel or the terrorists.

But the “good” terrorists rejected the unsolicited deal that Obama and Kerry got for them.

Obama and Kerry solved that problem the way that the solutionists had been solving it for decades. They blamed Israel. The insane logic of the two-state solution demanded it.

An Islamic terror state is the “solution” offered by the two-state solution. If you blame the terrorists, you undermine the credibility of the solution. If you admit the terrorists don’t even want to negotiate, you kill the two-state solution. And then how will you justify destroying Israel?

The great two-state solution began incrementally with an autonomous territory of disarmed terrorists. This fantasy led to a two-state solution of heavily armed terrorists inside Israel. The next stage is a one-state solution in which Israel will be forced to take in every single Muslim claiming to be a refugee.

And you can’t get from one stage to the next without blaming Israel when the previous stage fails. As it was always intended to. Each planned failure advances a more extreme incarnation of the “solution”.

All the way up to the final solution.

Each failure has to be blamed on Israel to justify an even more extreme solution. Each attack on Israel, like Obama’s UN treachery, is justified as a defense of the two-state solution. As long as the lie that the two-state solution is a pro-Israel policy lives, it can be weaponized as a pro-Israel attack on Israel.

In its terminal stage, the solution zombie will kill Israel and then die. Unless we kill it first.

The two-state solution hasn’t solved anything. It is the problem. And now it’s time to solve the problem of the two-state solution. Like the rest of the Jihad, the two-state solution is not a potent threat. It is a lie that we have become too weak to resist.

Lies die when we see them for what they are.

Like the old Monty Python bit, the two-state solution is a dead parrot. The shopkeepers of the press who keep trying to sell us its stiff unmoving body insist that the peace process is just pining for the Norwegian fjords of the Oslo peace accords. Feed it some more of Israel and it’ll fly back to life.

It’s never worked before, but there’s always an Nth time.

Lies are zombies. They are mimicries of the truth that feed off what we wish to be true.

The two-state solution is a parasite that thrives by feeding off our hopes and fears, our optimism on the one hand and our inability to imagine an alternative on the other. When we see the lie for what it is, when we turn our hopes and fears to sustaining what we truly care about, then it will fall.

Real solutions, such as Caroline Glick’s Israeli Solution, already exist.

The two-state solution however never existed. There will only be one state in Israel. The question is whether it will be a Jewish State or an Islamic terror state.

It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states.

That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.

What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both.

It was 2004. The poncho was the hottest fashion trend, there were 5 million new cases of AIDS and a former Nazi collaborator had bought the Democrat Party using the spare change in his sofa cushions.

And gone to war against the will of the people. This was what he modestly called his own “Soros Doctrine”. “It is the central focus of my life,” George Soros declared. It was “a matter of life and death.” He vowed that he would become poor if it meant defeating the President of the United States.

Instead of going to the poorhouse, he threw in at least $15 million, all the spare change in the billionaire’s sofa cushions, dedicated to beating President Bush.

In his best lisping James Bond villain accent, Soros strode into the National Press Club and declared that he had “an important message to deliver to the American Public before the election” that was contained in a pamphlet and a book that he waved in front of the camera. Despite his “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” voice, the international villain’s delivery was underwhelming. He couldn’t have sold brownies to potheads at four in the morning. He couldn’t even sell Bush-bashing to a roomful of left-wing reporters.

But he could certainly fund those who would. And that’s exactly what he did.

Money poured into the fringe organizations of the left like MoveOn, which had moved on from a petition site to a PAC. In 2004, Soros was its biggest donor. He didn’t manage to bring down Bush, but he helped buy the Democratic Party as a toy for his yowling dorm room of left-wing activists to play with.

Soros hasn’t had a great track record at buying presidential elections. The official $25 million he poured into this one bought him his worst defeat since 2004. But his money did transform the Democrat Party.

And killed it.

Next year the Democracy Alliance was born. A muddy river of cash from Soros and his pals flowed into the organizations of the left. Soros had helped turn Howard Dean, a Vermont politician once as obscure as this cycle’s radical Vermont Socialist, into a contender and a national figure. Dean didn’t get the nomination, but he did get to remake the DNC. Podesta’s Center for American Progress swung the Democrats even further to the left. And it would be Podesta who helped bring Hillary down.

The Democrats became a radical left-wing organization and unviable as a national political party. The Party of Jefferson had become the Party of Soros. And only one of those was up on Mount Rushmore.

Obama’s wins concealed the scale and scope of the disaster. Then the party woke up after Obama to realize that it had lost its old bases in the South and the Rust Belt. The left had hollowed it out and transformed it into a party of coastal urban elites, angry college crybullies and minority coalitions.

Republicans control twice as many state legislative chambers as the Democrats. They boast 25 trifectas , controlling both legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion. Trifectas had gone from being something that wasn’t seen much outside of a few hard red states like Texas to covering much of the South, the Midwest and the West.

The Democrats have a solid lock on the West Coast and a narrow corridor of the Northeast, and little else. The vast majority of the country’s legislatures are in Republican hands. The Democrat Governor’s Association has a membership in the teens. In former strongholds like Arkansas, Dems are going extinct. The party has gone from holding national legislative majorities to becoming a marginal movement.

And the Democrats don’t intend to change course. The way is being cleared for Keith Ellison, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with an ugly racist past, to head the DNC. Pelosi will oversee the disaster in the House. And Obama will remain the party’s highest profile national figure.

There could hardly be a clearer signal that the left intends to retain its donkey herding rights. Soros and his ilk have paid for the reins. That is why Pelosi, with her access to donors, will retain her position.

The left had recreated the Democrat Party and marginalized it. Much of this disaster had been funded with Soros money. Like many a theatrical villain, the old monster had been undone by his own hubris. Had Soros aided the Democrats without trying to control them, he would have gained a seat at the table in a national party. Instead he spent a fortune destroying the very thing he was trying to control.

George Soros saw America in terms of its centers of economic and political power. He didn’t care about the vast stretches of small towns and villages, of the more modest cities that he might fly over in his jet but never visit, and the people who lived in them. Like so many globalists who believe that borders shouldn’t exist because the luxury hotels and airports they pass through are interchangeable, the parts of America that mattered to him were in the glittering left-wing bubble inhabited by his fellow elitists.

Trump’s victory, like Brexit, came because the left had left the white working class behind. Its vision of the future as glamorous multicultural city states was overturned in a single night. The idea that Soros had committed so much power and wealth to was of a struggle between populist nationalists and responsible internationalists. But, in a great irony, Bush was hardly the nationalist that Soros believed. Instead Soros spent a great deal of time and wealth to unintentionally elect a populist nationalist.

Leftists used Soros money to focus on their own identity politics obsessions leaving the Dems with little ability to interact with white working class voters. The Ivy and urban leftists who made up the core of the left had come to exist in a narrow world with little room for anything and anyone else.

Soros turned over the Democrats to political fanatics least likely to be able to recognize their own errors. His protégés repeated the great self-destruction of the Soviet Union on a more limited scale

Soros fed a political polarization while assuming, wrongly, that the centers of power mattered, and their outskirts did not. He was proven wrong in both the United States of America and in the United Kingdom. He had made many gambles that paid off. But his biggest gamble took everything with it.

"I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche," Soros complained of the Republican wave in 2010. But he has been trying to do just that. And failing.

"There should be consequences for the outrageous statements and proposals that we've regularly heard from candidates Trump and Cruz," Soros threatened this time around. He predicted a Hillary landslide.

He was wrong.

As Soros plowed more money into the left, its escalating radicalism alienated more of the country. Each “avalanche” was a reaction to the abuses of his radicals. It wasn't Trump or Cruz who suffered the consequences. It wasn't even his own leftists. Rather it was the conservative and eventually the moderate wings of the Democrat party who were swept away by his left-wing avalanches.

The left did not mourn the mass destruction of the moderates. Instead it celebrated the growing purity of the Democrats as a movement of the hard left. It did not notice or care that it was no longer a political force outside a limited number of cities. It anticipated that voters would have no choice but to choose it over the "extremist" Republicans.

It proved to be very, very wrong.

George Soros spent a fortune to turn a national party favorable to the left into an organization that has difficulty appealing to anyone not on the left. He wanted to control a country he did not understand. And, as the left so often does, he achieved his goals and in doing so destroyed them.

(This article originally appeared here at Front Page Magazine)

Weakness is one of the greatest forms of power imaginable in the modern West. Weakness grants irresponsibility for personal actions and more importantly in a collectivist society, it provides freedom from for the collective burdens of society and civilization.

The weak are not responsible for their actions. They can rob, kill and rape, and still be excused for it . They can blow up buildings, behead prisoners and get sympathetic nods. Because they had no choice.

Weakness is helplessness, it implies irresponsibility because the weak are not capable of making their own choices. Their choices have been made for them by the "Man", the "Patriarchy", the "Privileged" and the "Military-Industrial Complex"-- all different names for the defined power structure and the people who are responsible for it.

Since the choices have been made for them, they have no choice but to lash out. When they kill, it is not an action, but a reaction.

To the people being raped or murdered by them, the ones jumping from buildings and coming to claim the pieces of their children at the morgue afterward, they do not appear to be helpless at all. But that is only because the people being raped and murdered, and waiting to identify a small can of their child's remains are privileged. So privileged that they don't know how responsible they are for the state of affairs which caused them to be raped or murdered. Which caused their children to end up in coffee cans.

Even when they are being raped or waiting to die, they are still the strong and the responsible, and their rapists and murderers are the downtrodden and dispossessed. The weak who are so helpless that they cannot help but seek their source of strength through violence against their oppressors. And if those oppressors happen to be women and children-- well then as the left has said from France to Russia to New York to Israel- "Power to the People". The "People" being the ones doing the killing. The oppressors being the ones doing the dying.

Weakness does not always translate into such extremity. What it translates into is irresponsibility for the collective burden of guilt that the left hangs around the head of every society. The responsibility for the poverty, the bigotry and all the inequities that are said to spring from it.

There are no more personal failures, whether economic or marital or ethical, only collective ones-- and the strong are responsible for their own failures and for everyone else's, while the weak are not even responsible for their own failures.

On the collective scale, choice is nearly irrelevant. Only people with power have choices. The idea that the man waiting in the alley with a knife has a choice is a heresy because he is not a man with a knife, he is a collection of social statistics which assign him an automatic level of responsibility based on his race, gender, socioeconomic status and all the other variables. Whether or not he stabs someone with a knife, is not up to him, it's up to how society treats him.

Similarly financial troubles are not personal, they are social. Whether you can pay your bills has nothing to do with you, but with your race and class. If you succeed when the statistics say that you should fail, then you are an outlier. A rogue exception that only goes to prove the rule. Likewise if you fail when the statistics say that you should succeed. Individual actions can never disprove the collective snapshot of how society is.

If every person is wired into society like a giant bank of servers, then every individual malfunction is actually a social malfunction. If a man kills, then it's because his connection with society was bad. To understand why it was bad, the left examines the nature of the connection. If it was a privileged connection, then he was warped by his excessive access to the innate racism, sexism, classism and all the other bad "isms" of the society. If it was an underprivileged connection, then he was warped by his lack of access to the benefits that society had to offer him and being marginalized, he went off the reservation.

Since all responsibility ultimately devolves to the society, not to the individual, and since the degree of individual responsibility depends on the degree of his connection with the society-- the less the connection, the less the responsibility. The man driving to work from the suburbs is more responsible for a murder in the ghetto than the actual murderer because he has helped create the conditions that led to the murder.

The "weak" murderer is better than the "strong" murder victim because being outside society, he is not truly responsible for anything. Not for his own actions or for the ozone layer, for toxic waste, illegal wars, unrealistic portrayals by the media and the rest of the litany of guilt that the left recites every day in its ceaseless prosecution of all of society and civilization.

In a society where people are expected to feel responsibility for planetary catastrophes and local inequities alike-- weakness is the greatest form of freedom.

Weakness is moral freedom because it liberates you from responsibility for your own actions and those of society. It is political freedom, because the weak can never say or believe anything that is inherently wrong, only "unhelpful". It is political privilege because politicians are expected to pay more attention to the downtrodden. It is economic privilege because companies are expected to redress social ills by advantaging the oppressed.

This dependent-independence from the system is a paradox as the weak derive maximum benefit from the system, while taking the least responsibility for it. It is the essence of the un-citizen of the nanny state who does not need to care how things are run, so long as they appear to be run for his benefit.

When social weakness is translated globally then it leads to global weakness. The globally weak, like the socially weak, are not responsible for their atrocities and genocides. It is the strong nations that are responsible to them and for them. Even when the weak are ridiculously wealthy and powerful, they are still weak. This is true socially and globally.

The weak can never become strong because they are a permanent constituency for change. To be week is to be in need of a protector, whether it's the nanny state or the united nations. Weakness justifies the illegal exercise of power on behalf of the weak. It justifies the disenfranchisement of citizens in a nation state, the destruction of nation states and the end of all individual rights if that is what it takes to create a just society. And that is what it always takes.

The left justifies its existence and its abuses by its self-depiction as a revolutionary force dedicated to remedying inequities in a permanent cycle of reforms that ends only when it enjoys total control and wields maximum power over every aspect of life under its dominion. Since equality cannot be created through the inequity of power, and since the left's mission is to create power inequities in order to remedy power inequities, its revolutions and reforms justify a permanent totalitarian state.

Social inequity is the permanent emergency that the left uses to justify its totalitarian state and the perpetuation of social inequity is the means which the left uses to maintain a state of permanent emergency. If one form of social inequity diminishes, the left finds another. And another. This endless search leads to a deconstruction of every aspect of society and the destruction of every human system. Human ways of living are replaced with grafted on artificial modes that fail and destroy their users. And the worse the society becomes, the more the state of permanent social emergency is justified.

The left consists of the strong who challenge the strong in the name of the weak, regardless of whether the weak want the challenge or not. By conceptually dividing the strong from the weak, the left disenfranchises the weak, and then disenfranchises the strong in the name of the weak. The end again is tyranny.

The left's remedy to inequity is to convince the majority and minority that they are incapable of exercising their power in a constructive fashion. The minority is told that they are incapable of it because the majority will not allow them the freedom to do it, but will thwart every effort they make at empowering themselves. The majority is told that any exercise of their power is a form of privilege which consciously or unconsciously disenfranchises the minority.

The minority are taught that they are weak. The majority are taught that they are abusive. The weak can escape into irresponsibility, while the strong escape into grandiosity. The weak refuse to take responsibility for anything until they become amoral monsters. The strong take responsibility for everything until they fancy themselves malicious gods who are destroying the earth.

By teaching some they are unnaturally weak and others that they are unnaturally strong, both are left unable to constructively exercise their power. The weak are taught that they can't do anything and therefore they can do everything without consequences. The strong are taught that they are doing everything and therefore should do as little as possible. Both are taught to distrust their use of power and to loathe their use of it.

The weak are taught to kill and still feel helpless. The strong are taught to feel that a single twitch of their finger is disturbing the earth. While the weak are robbed of conscious power, the strong are robbed of unconscious power. The weak treat their weakness as a strength and the strong treat their strength as a weakness. This leads naturally to the welfare state, to the elevation of the unqualified and the extinction of the competent.

Lost in all this is the individual as the pivot of life and the pillar of governments, whose rights justify the society and the state. By diminishing the individual to the level of a cog in a social machine, reducing his ambitions and dreams to irrelevancies amid the socioeconomic statistics that define his life, and eliminating his responsibility for his own actions, rather than those of others, the left destroys the base of every healthy society and the transformative energy that alters social orders.

In its pursuit of equality through tyranny, or tyranny through equality, it neuters the individual as the wielder of creative and economic forces that are actually capable of setting men free.